Spring and art are a marriage made in heaven. The season encourages new beginnings, and art inspired by spring provides the impetus to help propel us forward, with strokes and colors that trigger joy in the brain.
The St. Patrick’s Day Parade, Annapolis Restaurant Week, and a celebration of Maryland Day are reasons to shake off any leftover pandemic inertia and get back out in full swing. I also want to call your attention to several learning opportunities that will help expand your appreciation of fine art and get those synapses in your brain firing on all cylinders.
Photography in the Raw
The humbling exhibition “Photo Brut” brings together generations of self-taught artists who appropriate photographs or create their own.
The Japanese artist Ichiwo Sugino achieves his impersonations in “Photo Brut” mostly with adhesive tape and posts them on his Instagram account. Subjects include cultural figures from Thomas Edison to Alfred Hitchcock to Martin Scorsese and Andy Warhol.Credit.Ichiwo Sugino
Feb. 4, 2021
It’s great that the American Folk Art Museum doesn’t charge admission these days. More than one visit may be needed to absorb its landmark exhibition “Photo Brut: Collection Bruno Decharme & Compagnie.”
This jaw-dropping, sometimes heart-rending show a larger version of which was seen at a photography festival in Arles, France, last summer is a cornucopia of established and unfamiliar names, from the celebrated Henry Darger to the all-but-unknown Ichiwo Sugino; improvised mediums and often painful stories of isolated l